Quote Originally Posted by Anonymoose View Post
The Key is one of those things that makes me nervous.

At first glance, it has the risk of being one of those things where ... like ... something was impossible mainly because they story needed it to be in order to function, and now that part of the story is over, so to expand possibilities they immediately reveal that it's totally possible and actually quite easy "now that we know what we know" (see: tempering-curing porxie). Obviously - in real life - the sudden realization of a possibility that fundamentally eases the difficulty of a task is a thing that happens pretty regularly. But - in fiction - when such an event more or less perfectly coincides with the plot's needs and limitations and doesn't feel integrated into the big picture very well, it just feels like a cheap shuffling of plot devices to ease constraints on the writer, narrative quality be damned.
I felt this when the comment was made about the regulators allowed souls to merged and only remember the memories of the person who was being resurrected, and someone points out that it is similar to what happens in the 13th except the original "person isn't erased". And in my minds eye I see the quest to Solution 9 to get a regulator, to give it to a scion to reprogram it, and then give it to Zero to save some new character. Like a relative new problem to the main plot has already got a solution waiting in the wings for when we're ready to redeem the 13th.